2 thoughts on “The Enterprise Incident – Episode 58”

I read the Spock/Romulan Commander thing as the Commander trying to use every means at her disposal to seduce Spock to the Romulan side, including power, respect, common ancestry and physical attraction (after all, how often have we seen Kirk use that one?). The Commander is then angered when she finds out Spock is playing her as well, and lashes out at him. And of course because, as their conversation at the end of the episode reveals, they both unexpectedly felt something more.

A shame the character was never revisited, though of the two Romulan Commanders we see in TOS (Mark Lennard’s in Balance of Terror and Joane Linville’s here) I’d say more of the ‘DNA’ of Linville’s more manipulative character survives in the portrayals of Romulans in later Trek series.

With regard to not telling the crew, that’s taken straight out of Cold War norms for what is civil/military and what is espionage. Sending (say) a naval vessel somewhere to deliver or retrieve a spy would be a strict no-no, breaking all kinds of laws and treaties, but it happened fairly often.